After trying to price up flights from here to Majorca or the south of Spain for our spring holiday, we decided that the air travelling public and Matthew were not quite ready for each other. I put some details in google maps and discovered that while slightly further away, it only takes as long to drive from here to Barcelona as it does to Manchester.
So after returning from a trip to Britain visiting our relatives and checking up on our UK affairs we googled and found a nice flat in Sitges, near Barcelona, and booked several Accor group hotels for the route. We set out on the evening Wednesday the 9th and drove to Dijon, before taking a more leisurely day to get to Avignon where we spent the afternoon wandering the town, and looking at the bridge from the famous song. Well it’s more of a pier these days! And it was here we started our tour of Ikea restaurants of the world- we dropped in to Ikea Avignon for our evening meal.
The next day we drove in beautiful weather to Sitges, via Montpellier and Barcelona. The Barcelona underpasses we were directed on were terrifying and crowded places to drive through and reminded me of the Doctor Who episode “Gridlock”. Still at least the Catalans appeared to be co-operative drivers.
Saturday was Sarah’s birthday and we got the train into Barcelona, where we encountered torrential and relentless rain! We took a city tour bus to see the sights from underneath a big red awning while an expressionless English woman talked about them in my ear. Barcelona was great but it would have been nice to see it in dry weather.
Apart from one more day in Barcelona, when it rained again, the rest of the week was spent mostly in Sitges, wandering the streets going to cafes, sitting by the sea, going to more cafes… it was really lovely.
Then on Friday we made our way back, driving up through the mountains and Andorra to Toulouse, (IKEA again!) and back via Avignon and Dijon again to home.
It was a really nice trip.
We’ve uploaded some photos here.
